1) In an era when someone can steal 130 million credit card numbers, it makes sense to be diligent about protecting your reporting materials. But being diligent doesn’t necessarily mean giving up on some of the most useful digital tools journalists now have access to, like Web-based software. It just means understanding a little bit about how new digital tools work and how to use them securely.

There are basically three levels of sharing with Google Docs:

A) LOCKED: Each document you create can be kept completely to yourself, requiring you to log-in with your private username and password.

B) PRIVATELY-SHARED: You can share a document with one other person or a group of people, by e-mailing it to them as an attachment, or by opening access to the Web-based document. The “Share” tab makes this very easy.

C) PUBLIC: You can publish a document so that anyone online can see it (assuming they have the link). With each level of sharing you can let people view and edit, or just view.

Click on the image below for a larger screenshot of the ‘Share’ Tab and the rest of the Google Docs editing menu:

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

No one can access your web-based documents unless you specifically decide to share them with a particular person or group. Your Docs are locked up with a password just like your voice-mail, your home alarm system and your e-mail. A good place to read about how Docs lets you choose who can or cannot see your documents is in the official Google Docs documentation. It helps explain how Google keeps private documents separate from those that you or I choose to publish or share with colleagues.

For more information on how secure Docs are, and various testimonials, there’s a helpful, brief discussion, including comments from a Google representative, Neil Fraser, on GetSatisfaction.com, in response to the question: Is it safe to upload private documents on Google Docs? In short, the company draws sharp, digitally secure walls between the private notes you’re drafting for a story in progress, and the docs that you have published or shared. Because the digital robots and search-engine spiders that crawl the Web can’t get to your documents, spreadsheets or presentations, your docs won’t appear in any search index.

2) It’s in Google’s interest to be vigilant in ensuring that document security is guarded carefully. If private documents were to leak out onto the public Web, not only would Google’s reputation suffer, but so would the future viability of the company’s growing Apps business, which is predicated on getting companies to pay Google to store vital company documents. I recently wrote about the growing number of colleges and universities that are relying on Google to provide e-mail and document services for their students, and in many cases, faculty and staff. IT representatives – many of whom were initially skeptical about the idea of storing student information and documents on Google’s servers – have grown to trust the company’s servers and the security of Google Docs over the past two years. The corporate world is starting to buy in too. Motorola and Genentech are among the companies that have decided Google Docs’ security and privacy features are reliable.

This isn’t to say that Docs is perfect. The company admitted a security blunder back in 2007, when the software was still new. And security consultant Ade Barkah expressed concerns in March ’09 about certain Docs features, to which Google has responded. These are good reminders that no software system is perfect, nor is anything online 100% secure. The field of Web-based software is still relatively young. But the fact that thousands of institutions and a growing number of major companies rely on Docs’ security is indicative of the software’s underlying stability and security for the vast majority of its users.

3) Unless we forgo email, voice-mail and other crucial tools of contemporary communication, it’s unlikely that our information gathering will ever be as locked off from the wider world as our paper documents once were. The key thing is take appropriate precautions by selecting a password carefully and protecting it judiciously. Here are two additional tips from Neil Fraser’s post mentioned above.

“When using an unencrypted wireless connection or some other network you don’t really trust, use https://docs.google.com instead of http://docs.google.com. The extra ‘s’ means ‘secure’; all traffic is encrypted. The only down-side is it’s a little bit slower. 2) When you use someone else’s computer (especially at an Internet cafe or at a hotel), don’t forget to logout of your Google account. And when logging in, don’t check “remember my password.”

Incidentally, Google employees use the software themselves, for what that’s worth. Here’s what Fraser writes:

“Here at Google we use Docs to store all our confidential documents, spreadsheets and presentations. We use the same servers and we have no worries about people being able to see our data.”

If you are skeptical about Google in particular, there are other other good Web-based software options for journalists, including Zoho Docs. Another sleekly-designed, simple tool for creating individual documents is Writeboard from 37 Signals. And if you’re a fan of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, Microsoft has said it will launch a Web-based version of its own software in 2010.